Economic and Corporate Diplomacy

Abstract

Fundamentally ambivalent, economic diplomacy conveys both a warring approach and one of economic cooperation. How can the national interest be reconciled with the necessary regulation of global markets to ensure collective security and prosperity and, as a result, the stability of the international system? Economic diplomacy, shaped gradually in the late nineteenth century by the major European powers, joined later by Japan and the United States, was both an instrument for imperial dominance in the East, the Far East and Africa, for penetrating newly independent markets in Central and South America, and a means for smaller European states to assert themselves in a competitive world. The strengthening of multilateral economic diplomacy around the First World War confirmed the increased interdependence of economies and societies set in motion during the first phase of contemporary globalization in the 1860s, the diversification of objects of negotiation, and the fundamental interconnectedness of economic questions with cultural, social, and strategic issues. It became a tool in the hands of certain developing states in the late 1960s and emerging ones in the 1990s and 2000s. Asserting themselves through realist policies where the quest for wealth dovetails with a desire for power, emerging countries have forced developed states to rethink their own approach to economic diplomacy. Studying the latter represents a vital marker in thinking about new power hierarchies that do not always correspond to the ones passed on after the Second World War.